DVD of the Week: “The Wrong Man”

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 drama “The Wrong Man,” (which I discuss in this clip) is, in some ways, the Hitchcock film for people who don’t like Hitchcock films. That, at least, is what it was for me, decades ago, when I was more sensitive to his showmanship than to his artistry and more moved by surprise than suspense. The double documentary basis of this movie—its origins in a true story that Hitchcock follows meticulously, and its filming largely on location in New York—lent it (so I thought) an air of self-constraining sincerity and curiosity that, nonetheless, got to the very essence of the filmmaker’s moral universe (so I still believe). It’s not Hitchcock’s most symbolically rich film, nor his most visually extravagant, but it’s the one in which his severe religious worldview is most overtly expressed. (It also includes some remarkable performances by Henry Fonda and Vera Miles—whose moments of dissociation chilingly foreshadow Tippi Hedren’s in “The Birds” and “Marnie”).